


Grey Ever After

by Domimagetrix



Series: Razwan Bahir, World Guardian [19]
Category: Runescape
Genre: Adult Language, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional Outbursts, Headcanons Everywhere, Letting Go the Game, Multi, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-15 14:43:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16065290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Domimagetrix/pseuds/Domimagetrix
Summary: Timeline-wise, the final chapter of Razwan's canonverse. She and Sliske visit the Shadow Realm's Heart.





	Grey Ever After

 

_I never doubted it  
__What's for you will not pass you by_  
_I never questioned it_  
_It was decided before I asked, "why?"_

Moloko - "Familiar Feeling"

 

 

Clouds transitioned from gravid-looking clumps and took on the rippling patterns of water as Sliske and I stepped into the Shadow Realm’s Heart. I alternated attention to my footing with glances upward, tracking the change, until the surface gained the same clarity I’d first seen in Sliske’s completed soul.

We didn’t speak. None of the plane’s creatures challenged us, concave eyeshine discs waxing and waning as their owners’ heads turned first toward us then away. They maintained their distance in silent, eerie consensus.

There’d been a time when all that had kept the sinewy, pitiless beings at distance was Sliske, as he’d demonstrated that fact to me shortly after our encounter near Ghorrock. Temptation - and the simple cost-benefit assessment of hungry things faced with questionably-defended food - had arisen when I’d been in Sliske’s company before, and his brief, clarifying absence had seen the predators descending swiftly on me before he’d returned and sent them back to their opportunistic watch.

Now they glanced at us. Marked the both of us with the same mutual caution they used among each other. The evaluating stares were no more.

There was no prey here.

Skeletal trees began taking on leaves and a bluish-silver glow at their cores as we moved down the slow decline. Pillars of translucent light still travelled their paths across the landscape, a colonnaded and insubstantial cathedral in perpetual motion. The air here had never been baked warm by the sun, and it pressed an inexorable chill from skin to bone, a temperature that made no outright threat but leeched hope from the body with ancient patience and stale breath.

The plane became more lifelike as we neared the bridges, or at least less prohibitive toward living things. This realm’s version of Zanaris continued to reflect light to us from a source beyond our understanding.

A sleeve brushed my arm. I reached without looking, wrapping an arm around both it and its contents.

Sliske didn’t seem to mind. He sounded amused. Smug. “One casual stroll through my inner workings, and you’re claiming me like a-”

“-Shut up.” I squeezed the arm to gentle my words. “Truce.”

He went silent, stopping. “Were we at war?”

I stopped with him, turned, and looked up at his face. “Tell me what you want.”

The angular marks on either side of his mouth stretched with the beginnings of a grin, then fell back into place as he abandoned the effort. Solemnity made him peculiar. “I don’t know.”

We moved to the little jut of slate where his soul liaison and I had sat during our exchange. Serrated leaves moved with the air disturbance as we took our places, and I wondered if he recalled my meeting with his intermediary well enough that he chose the same side knowingly, or if coincidence prompted both his choice and my _déjà vécu_. The absence of blasted ruins diluted the feeling, but only just.

I crossed my legs next to him. “Try.”

He didn’t speak right away. His hands went to his lap, tensed into fists, and he looked out toward the nebulous swirl of deep grays beyond the bridges ahead of us. Robe and collar hid too much for me to see if the tension had wound itself anywhere else.

“I don’t know where to begin.”

My hand found one of his and rested overtop the clenched fist. “Jas.”

Sliske looked down at my hand. His relaxed beneath mine, turned, and trapped the latter in an awkward cage as he shrugged. “Mistakes were made. Beyond the games, nothing had any meaning, and I was running out of games.”

I laughed, interrupting the near-quiet and startling myself. “Existential musings after thousands of years?”

He snorted. “They become less interesting with age.”

That I believed. I smiled. "'What does it all mean?' I asked myself that when I was... twenty? Somewhere around then. It felt like a very big question. Profound. Like the answer to it should shake everything apart."  
  
Sliske looked at me again. "Less literally, I would imagine."  
  
I nodded. “It’s nice to have meaning, but I don't want or need anything as grand as a purpose. Not anymore."  
  
He shifted, settling into something that looked comfortable - and probably wouldn’t have been had I been the one doing it - against the incline of rock behind us. "And why is that, my heart? What existential revelation have you made? There are new truths to my existence now, in case you’d forgotten."  
  
The maelstrom ahead continued to swirl in viscous eddies of shadow ahead of us. I stared at it. "Because I have the answer to the purpose question. I met the very reason the universe exists. And it's the pettiest thing I can fucking imagine."

He tugged at my hand and I reclined with him as he spoke. “This is hardly a motivational speech. I stand at a precipice, my heart. You’ve changed the fundamental nature of death for me. Toss a bone, would you?”

I ignored him. “You know what really gets me about her?” I lifted his hand in mine and examined it. “Jas, I mean. She wasn’t exactly a fountain of comprehension.”

Sliske lost the casual air and pinned me with an interested look. Or… a look, anyway.

I shrugged and looked back. “Some of the simplest concepts I tried to express were lost on her. She didn’t know what _war_ was, Sliske. She didn’t understand why we fought for resources on our world. Or for dominance. Maybe they create life, but they have _no understanding of life._ It was like trying to explain it to a…” I trailed off, the picture dawning on me. “Fuck.”

He _hmphed_ at me. “Nothing short of a miracle you didn’t call her that to her that to her face-”

I sat up and looked down at him. “Sliske, they’re kids. All of them. They’re _all children.”_

“They’re older than the universe.” The gentle humor fell from his face. “Razwan, no.”

“Mah wasn’t an outlier. They kicked her out the way schoolyard toughs keep the smaller kids off the playground, but she wasn’t the only-”

_“ENOUGH!”_

He pulled his hand from mine and stood too fast, a being of compressed energy propelling himself away with no transition from the languid, smug man I’d been nestled against a moment ago. He spun in a half-turn and knelt in front of me, hands on either side of the rock on which I sat, eyes boring into mine. “Tell me something, little heart. Who made you?”

Something had begun sliding beneath my feet in this conversation, but I didn’t understand what, and instinct insisted it would be unwise to back down. Leaning forward, I touched his nose tip with mine. “My parents.”

“Don’t play dense with me. Made _all_ of you, Razwan, not _just_ you. Who made humans? When? Where? On what world? By what means?” He lifted the hand to my left and slapped it against the slate, creating a hard sound that resounded oddly around us and made me jump. “What god, what agency, what force brought humanity into the fold? _Tell me.”_

“How the fuck do I know? Nobody knows.” _What the fuck does this have to do with anything?_

“And that’s exactly the point, isn’t it?” He leaned back, palms rasping as they slid over the grit on the stone. “You complain because you’re given no answers and must produce your own. You bemoan your existences, you humans, from a position of incomprehensible freedom.”

The sense of too much energy held in a brittle container remained in him. He’d been this way when he’d discovered I’d found and read his journal.

...almost.

I pressed. “And?”

_“And?”_ He sounded indignant. The pause said otherwise. “And…”

A nascent suspicion tried to move my arms around him and draw him in. It went suppressed. There were no right moves with Sliske, no revelations held sacrosanct, only a multitude of shifting paths posing risk in varying extremes. Intuition meant little with him.

I spoke softly while the urge went unanswered. “And?”

A long-fingered hand reached for mine, held it at the wrist, and brought it up until my fingers brushed the pair of amber gems set between the markings my mind stubbornly insisted were Sliske’s eyebrows. His eyes closed as he spoke. “There is no mystery in my existence. I know where I come from, the nature of the being who made my kind, and I know she no longer exists. I know what drives her favored creation, the little god who fancies himself her inevitable successor.”

He set my hand down, his fingers still curled in a loose manacle around my wrist, and his eyes - circumscribed by hypnotic, wavering lines of manipulated moonlight from above - opened. They held mine.

“The Mahjarrat were conceived in the absence of enigma, Razwan, and we suffer for it. Only the most unobservant among us are surprised by anything the others do.” There was a squeeze from the hand trapping my wrist. “I know Zamorak will move against Saradomin again, probably soon, because he’s restless in the face of stability and always has been. I know Azzanadra prays for stagnation, or any means of foiling ascension. I know Akthanakos struggles, but diverts focus away from himself though frenzied attempts to lift the burden of self-hate from others. He refuses to acknowledge his own pain, burying anger in good deeds done on behalf of humans, all the while wishing he, himself, was one of them. Wahisietel seeks solitude, always has.”

More than his words, his voice bespoke age. “We do not surprise each other, my heart. Not for long. And I tell you it’s intolerable.”

Sliske fell silent, gaze searching mine. I dispensed with a little caution and reached for his face. “Maybe the Mahjarrat understand each other, but I don’t get you at all.”

He blinked, something of an indulgent smile almost - but not quite - settling into his features. “You ‘get me’ more than you think you do.”

I snorted at him, reaching beneath the widow’s peak hood and touching his ear. “I understand Zaros more than I understand you.”

That earned me a laugh, and an almost imperceptible change in his posture displaced the tension from before. He turned his head and licked my wrist, drawing his ear from my attentions. “Do you, now, my heart?”

_Mercurial as fucking lava…_

But he wasn’t. Or, he _was,_ but not like this. The shift in temperament wasn’t another emotional floodgate being opened.

I was being rewarded.

I moved my hand away from his face and leaned forward. “No. Talk to me about Mah.”

Sliske didn’t shift back to anger, not precisely, but the neutrality that colored his tone felt thin. “You aren’t prepared for this conversation, Razwan.”

Oh, but I was.

“No. No, you don’t get to withhold this and blindside me with it it later.” I stopped, this time heeding intuition’s plea. “Invoke the contract.”

He opened his mouth and inhaled to speak. Held it.

Air hissed between his teeth and gave me a strange look. “No. It’s pointless now, isn’t it?”

I nodded, turning the arm whose wrist was trapped in the loose cage of his fingers, and held that hand. “It was the stupidest thing you’ve ever come up with, and I say that with the full body of my experience in navigating your stupid ideas behind me. I won’t lie to you.” My fingers laced through the spaces between his and it felt fine. “Like Rhyaz says. ‘Turn and turn about.’ You go first.”

Everything paused as Sliske took another breath.

This time the breath wasn’t held. It was trapped, an innocent thing that found itself unable to escape when his false equilibrium shattered and emotion consumed him again.

His hands left both the slate outcropping and my wrist, becoming manacles anew on my upper arms, tightening enough to bruise. Anger mantled his voice, plates of it that threatened to slide off as whatever existed beneath it shuddered. “You.”

He shook me, gently compared to the twin pressures around my arms, but the bared-teeth expression to which I was being introduced wasn’t predatory. Or particularly stable. Something in his jaw twitched and his voice was brittle. “You. Can’t.”

I showed deference to instinct and kept my voice soft. “It’s time to let it go, Sliske.”

Only a slight widening of his eyes, more an infinitesimal lift of his eyebrow ridges than anything, betrayed surprise.

The dam in him broke. Had there been birds in this place, they’d have risen as one and scattered in terror.

_“YOU CAN’T DRAG ME INTO YOUR EXISTENCE AND LEAVE.”_

Whatever had shifted beneath my feet before had vacated the premises entirely. “What?”

“You! _You infuriating bitch!_ You were no more invested in going on than I was.” He shook me again. “Your games! Jumping atop flying objects or off cliff faces or right into the bloody hands of Death, and don’t think for a moment Akthanakos is capable of keeping anything from me.” Another shake. “But even death was never the end for you. You have a soul, my heart, and I had none. We didn’t play our games with the same stakes on the table, and _now we do, and you will not leave me here to contend with it alone. You will not rip nothingness from me and tell me my existence can be attributed to infants toying with the components of the very universe, do you hear me?”_

The beginnings of a response - and a feeling - began to stir, but he wasn’t done.

_“You WILL choose._ You may reform my past or wrest my escape from me, but you _cannot have both, Razwan._ Risk I understand, but you were ready to fling yourself off that cliff and leave me to it and I _will not. Endure. This prison. Without you.”_

With each pause came another shake. With each shake, something crumpled painfully and fell away.

“You will _never do that again._ Ride your gnome fliers or take the hard bloody path like the insufferable masochist you are, but you will live or I _will kill you.”_

I could’ve fought the upsurge of feeling knocking the shattered remnants of sickening pain away, or I could’ve suppressed a laugh at his words, but not both.

I laughed at him.

He stopped shaking me, stunned. “Do I need to return you to Akthanakos? I’m not ready for an hallucinatory episode if I’m not the one providing hallucinations-”

“I’ll take it.”

Sliske sounded awed. “I put all this effort into threatening you and you giggle. Have you no respect for a Mahjarrat in crisis?”

“Sliske.”

_“What?”_

I reached for his forearms and squeezed. “I’m done with cliffs.”

He looked comically disbelieving.

Another squeeze. “I mean it. No more.”

“Liar.”

“Invoke the fucking-”

The grip on my upper arms gentled. “Fine, you’ve made your point. Why?”

I smiled at him. “Because we’re World fucking Guardians, that’s why.”

Something clenched in his face. His throat moved as if to swallow. Sliske opened his mouth, and an expressionless bark escaped him.

He let go my arms and fell back into the sand, clamped his hands to his middle, and laughed.

I scooted off the slate shelf and knelt, one hand on his chest, and watched him, beginning to snicker. “Fuck you, World Guardian Sliske.”

He was gone. His laugh was as pure and whole as Akthanakos’s. “I… you! _Bitch!”_

I snorted, the sound giving way to my own laughter. I half-collapsed against him with my face buried in his robe and let go.

At least a minute of helpless chortling passed before I could speak again. “Why… the _fuck_ is it so funny when any of you swear?”

He drew in air and his voice was beautiful in the promise of losing it again. “I endeavor to end your entire world. Everything. So you _give me the world to protect._ What is _wrong_ with you?”

Lifting my head, I patted his chest and poured a too-perky version of his accent into my voice. “Nothing personal, old sock. Bit of a personal vendetta, you see. If the world’s to end, it was my first priority to con the greatest con artist in Gielinor’s history. Turns out I won the lottery in addition to pulling the con, giving the deathbound mark something new to live for, hmm? Fancy that.”

He shattered, wheezing, half-silent laughter ripping through him.

Shafts of light moved around us, and a few of the predatory eyes moved in, some close enough to reveal the creatures’ silhouettes. One - a seamless blend of canine and feline - moved closer than the rest and lay down several feet away. Its light orange eyes watched us both.

“Your impressions leave everything to be desired, my heart.” Sliske’s control began to return, and he propped himself up on his elbows. He switched to Pollnivnean. _“And burn this fuck-ugly carpet while you’re at it.”_

I blinked, sitting up again.

Nothing. Something. Then remembrance.

“Are you fucking kidding me? _That’s_ what you spent your time on in there?”

Sliske’s hands turned palms-up in a shrug. “Your soul isn’t what I’d call ‘intuitive’ where organization is concerned.” The last of his mirth drained away, and something more contemplative replaced it. “You weren’t particularly uncomfortable on Freneskae, were you?”

The change was too abrupt, and I blinked at him. “I can’t say much about the view over there.”

“Not that.” He rocked from elbows to palms on the sand and sat up with me, resting fingertips on my chin. “Freneskae is a relentless challenge to the living being, always has been. But you went in and returned little the worse for wear.”

I shrugged at him. “Did you see the unicorn?”

He lifted an eye ridge. “I’ve seen many.”

I took his hand away from my face and captured it in both of mine. “When I was twelve, Otto left me in the Wilderness with the usual equipment - knife, waterskin, and a warning not to return without a black unicorn horn. Not a Rellekkan one, either. He’d know the difference.”

Sliske nodded.

“You’ve seen them. Those stringy fucks. They’ll shoot their blasts of magic at you if you get too close.”

Another nod.

“I was just outside their herd territory for two days. I hadn’t really rationed out my water well, so I had a choice - fail, or get one of those horns that day. I got one.” I paused. “I was out in the Wilderness a lot. It’s not that different.”

That strange, considering note didn’t leave his voice. “I think you would’ve made a very interesting Mahjarrat.”

I held up a finger. “Not a fucking chance. I like my hair.”

His hand moved from my hold and found that hair. “We can shapeshift, you know.”

An odd sound escaped me. “You mean. You mean _you could-”_

It was my turn to collapse in a heap of giggles.

I was pretty sure my soul had tried to separate itself and scurry away. Sliske with the yellow hair my imagination had given him threatened my sanity.

Sliske spoke over my mirth. “So I’m ‘the greatest con artist Gielinor’s ever seen,’ hmm?”

Drinking in air like one who’d never had it before, I sat up and wiped at my face. “You call _me_ insufferable?”

He let me catch my breath, then spoke again with that odd calm. “You’re a bloody nightmare.”

“Prick.”

“Harridan.”

“Praefucktus Pricktorio.”

“Arcana Feral.”

I chuckled, sidling down until I lay faceup with my head on his thigh. “Stop me from taking that as a compliment.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“You’re still a prick.”

“I love you.”

We were both still. So still.

His hand found itself in my hair. He still looked so solemn. “I don’t serve her purpose anymore. I might not be able to help you.” His amber eyes closed for a moment, then opened again. “There will be more mazes, Razwan, and more uncomfortable positions. More games.”

I watched him, feeling my hair shift with his ministrations.

He sat straighter, bowing forward, looking as earnest as his soul surrogate had. “I will never be what Quen is to you.”

Hearing Nomad’s given name struck me.

_Truth._

I smiled up at Sliske. “You promise?”

It was his turn to look puzzled. “Promise?”

My eyes closed and I luxuriated in the hair-stroking. “To quit trying to be someone else.”

“I don’t follow, my heart.”

“Sure you do.” I reached up next to my head and patted his leg. “You’re good to wake up next to, but never for a moment did I mistake you for anyone but Sliske. You’re not good at domesticity and I like that.” My hand went to rest at my side.

And met something warm. Something that moved.

I sat up too suddenly, eyes shooting open, Sliske’s fingers pulling briefly in my hair before withdrawing. I looked down.

My had had been resting on a head. An orange-eyed, canine-feline head.

Despite my sudden movement, the sinewy being didn’t tense, snarl, or move away. Orange eyes watched me and softly-curved ears splayed to either side of its head.

“An outcast from her pack. I’m surprised she’s lived this long.” Sliske chuckled. “She seeks to join you.”

I held my fingers in front of her nose. Her head lifted, and she licked the backs of my fingers with a cold, raspy tongue. “She’ll eat the hellrats.”

Sliske’s arm wrapped around my middle and he rested his chin carefully on my shoulder. “She can’t travel beyond this place.” His other hand went to mine and placed it on the beast’s head. “Look out toward the others. Meet their eyes, and keep your hand on her head.”

I did as he asked. I stared into the dimness beyond the Heart, meeting various hollow, reflective eye shapes in turn.

One by one, those eyes turned away.

Sliske didn’t offer an explanation and I didn’t ask. I knew. When we left, she’d be alright.

I’d said my piece on the matter.

I stroked the top of her head and spoke to Sliske. “Can we let go this one charade? Are we done playing that game?”

He was silent behind me, breath stirring the hair around my ear.

He gave in. “No more of that game. But there will be games, Razwan. Always games. I am who I am.”

I smiled. “Good. And Quen?”

The arm around me drew me more tightly against him as he spoke. “"At this point in his life, he might reluctantly take your offer of help. Perhaps. But anyone else's? Mine especially?”

Sliske sighed. “No. All he's had has been hard-won. Some take what good life hands them with little question. Some with suspicion. Some, like Nomad, hold mistrust so very dear that it becomes a part of what they believe themselves to be.”

It hurt to hear, but there was no lie in it. “He has to come to you.”

“Yes. Nomad will stumble, fall, and scrabble for his own bootstraps even when his boots are nowhere to be found because he is a creature of rigid habit. But he is close.” Sliske _hmphed_ in wry amusement. “He's lashed out at you, and returned when he realized you aren't someone with whom he need test his position at every turn, but I have used him to my own ends. So has nearly everyone else. He will not believe himself equal, or believe I see him thus, until he wrests the reins from my hands himself."

I tickled a Shadow Realm hellbeast-ear and nodded. “I guess not.” A little twist in my chest brought the threat of tears. “I wish we could just…”

“He will when he’s ready.”

I thought back to that day in Pollnivneach. Quen showing up in my tent, no answers, no explanations, offering me nothing save a defensively apologetic look and equally defensive apology.

I nodded again. “But we’re done shitting each other about this? Swear it?”

He chuckled. “I don’t make many promises, but on this, I swear.”

I believed Sliske.

**Author's Note:**

> Though I've still got some work to do in replacing the older fics I'd erased from the botched first Razcanon, this is the linear "end of the line." There are some pivotal quests and events that are absent now thanks to that earlier wipe-and-restart, and I'm aware how disjointed/unexplained much of the proper 'verse looks sans context. Those fics will be written anew and slotted appropriately, hopefully clearing up some things I had to take for granted in the currently-existing body of writing. Notably, there's a lack of context where her relationships are concerned. How they were formed, why they were formed. I still have every intention of going back and replacing those now-absent fics with updated, Razlore-accurate versions.
> 
> Though I'm sure Runescape's in-game quest creation will go on, and Raz will have a place in some of those events, I don't believe they'll necessitate describing in fic form. Should something capture my fancy, I'll simply make note of it in the Big Fuckin' Headcanon/Lore Compendium post.
> 
> Whether you're reading this one before or after the re-inclusion of those context fics, I want to say thank you for reading Razwan's story. It will never stop amazing me that anyone took to it at all, and I still look back at comments left by people who took the time to leave them. With absolutely *no* shortage of gratitude. I still fucking tear up at them. I keep screenshots of them right on hand for when those episodes of self-dragging and Bullshit Inner Voice hit.
> 
> Whether you left a comment somewhere along the line or just stopped by on your way through, thank you. You people fuckin' rock.
> 
> <3 <3 <3


End file.
